AMD launches a new website to educate the consumer on the evils of Intel

AMD is enjoying the fact the European Commission charged Intel for anticompetitive measures. The company enjoys the fact so much it has launched a new pseudo-advertising campaign website providing updates on the case. The new AMD website, breakfree.amd.com, provides all the information you would ever need to know on the allegations. Additionally, the site provides information on antitrust, competition and procurement.

Of course, since it is an AMD site the information is going to favor AMD. There is no mention of the official response from Intel regarding the subject matter. All the industry quotes cited by AMD reflect negatively on Intel. Not that I am trying to defend Intel or anything, but only the European Commission has charged Intel. Nothing has been proven and until there is an official ruling on the issue, I reserve my opinion on Intel’s tactics.

At the end of the day, a corporation’s primary goals are to make money. I highly doubt AMD intends to educate buyers about a competitive marketplace. However, since it is the only direct Intel competitor, it wants a bigger slice of pie. The company enjoyed major growth with the launch of Opteron and Athlon 64. The company also struck a major deal with Dell – a once Intel only house.

Sadly, like every other company, with growth and a performance-leading product, they get arrogant. The once great Intel lost the battle to 1.0 GHz to AMD’s Athlon and moved towards the clock-happy Netburst architecture. While the Netburst architecture, in its later days, had no troubles beating out the Athlon XP, the Athlon 64 and Opteron was a tougher sell.

AMD was in the lead for quite a bit, through the end of Northwood and the lifetime of Prescott, Smithfield and Presler. This is where the arrogance sets in. AMD’s fabrication processes, processors and competition was a bit lackluster. The K8 architecture remains around, after launching over three years ago. AMD is barely pushing out 65nm products and continues to hock new 90nm products. Not much has really changed from the AMD lineup except the move to dual-core.

Intel saw the mistakes of its clock-happy era and arrogance and released Conroe. The company is also on a fast track plan of shrinking fabrication processes every other year and launching completely new architectures in-between. AMD could learn a thing or two from Intel’s stringent roadmap.

I will give AMD the benefit of the doubt though. They might have a killer next-generation product, but from the early testing I have performed on Barcelona, there is no light at the end of the tunnel -- with the K10 generation at least. However, AMD isn’t planning to issue DVT samples of Barcelona to partners until later this month. Who knows, maybe they somehow gained an extra 10% in clock-for-clock performance since then.

There is still light at the end of the tunnel in the long-run. AMD’s recent Technology Analyst day revealed interesting details of the company’s modular Fusion architecture. Maybe Fusion is just what AMD needs to swing the pendulum back into its favor. Either way, AMD has a tough road ahead.

The late launch of its quad-core processors, nearly a year after Intel, and the new Phenom branding will keep the marketing team busy. There’s a lot the company needs to do, but “breaking free” is the least of its problems.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer